Bob Harrison scouted baseball players for 50 years. Whenever he flew into Cincinnati to watch Ken Griffey Jr. play for Moeller High, he felt like Ansel Adams at the foot of El Capitan.

“He was the best player I ever signed,” Harrison said Monday, sitting at his home in Long Beach.

Since Harrison worked for the Seattle Mariners, he was in luck. The Mariners were the worst team in baseball in 1986, not an unfamiliar niche. They could pick the top player in the 1987 draft and Harrison was convinced it was Griffey. He also worried that his owner, George Argyros, would disagree.

“We had drafted some high school players that hadn’t panned out,” Harrison said. Seattle led off the 1979 draft with Al Chambers, an outfielder from Pennsylvania. Chambers played 57 games over three seasons for Seattle and hit .218. The tenth pick, third baseman Tim Wallach from Cal State Fullerton, went to Montreal and played 18 major league years.

The Mariners thought the top two players were Griffey and Mike Harkey, a pitcher from, again, Cal State Fullerton. Harrison and Roger Jongewaard, then the scouting director, saw the danger.

“I told Roger I was going to pump up Griffey on my report,” Harrison said. “If I didn’t have him ranked ahead of Harkey, there’s no way we could take him.”

When they made their case to Argyros, the owner glared at them and said, “You’d better be right.”

Six hundred thirty home runs later, Harrison and Argyros crossed paths at Dennis Gilbert’s Scouts Foundation dinner at the Beverly Hilton. Argyros grinned at Harrison and said, “You were right.”

Part of him is already there. Harrison’s official report on Griffey is part of a scouting exhibit at Cooperstown.

“The only negatve thing on my report was that he didn’t run out balls like he should,” Harrison said. “But he was so much better than anyone else. The game was easy for him.”

The second pick was Mark Merchant, a high school outfielder. “He was one of those gung-ho guys,” said R.J. Harrison, Bob’s son and an executive with Tampa Bay. “He ran out everything. He was a scout’s dream.”

Harrison and Tom Mooney, Seattle’s area scout, met Ken Griffey Sr. and his wife Roberta at the Clarion Hotel in Cincinnati. The Griffeys began angling for various perks. Harrison said he couldn’t provide them, but he did have the one thing they wanted: “Your son can be the first pick in the draft.”

Harrison and Mooney had breakfast at the Griffey home the next day. They all agreed to a $160,000 bonus, a couple of days before the draft. Junior was a regular big leaguer 18 months later, at 19. At 23 he hit 45 home runs.

He was hurt much of 1995 but returned to spur the Mariners to their first playoff series win. That nicely coincided with a stadium referendum. Griffey and Randy Johnson basically built Safeco Field and made the franchise stay put.

Four times Griffey amassed 130 or more RBIs, and he won four home run titles and 10 Gold Gloves. There were still misgivings: no World Series appearances, and various wall-banging injuries that stopped him short of 700 home runs.

Mike Harkey, picked fifth by the Cubs, pitched eight years in the majors for six clubs and went 36-36.

“Junior was amazing in high school,” Mooney said. “Roger and I went to a game where they had trees beyond the centerfield fence, maybe 30 or 40 feet high. Junior hit one of those high fly balls that never comes down. Roger said, ‘Which one of those trees did that hit?’ I had to tell him it went over the trees.

“He had five tools, but you might have to watch five games to see them all. His family kept him grounded. They’d have ping pong tables and pinball machines in the garage and all the neighborhood kids would come over. It wasn’t like the Griffeys would warn the kids not to break any trophies. It was very comfortable there.”

At 95, Bob Harrison won’t get to Cooperstown. He’s a little sad because David Henderson, another first-round pick for Seattle, died a couple of weeks ago.

But he signed plenty more, and he will always go down as the one man who, for just one day, exaggerated Ken Griffey Jr. As always, the truth hit harder than fiction.

Three facts:

1 Ken Griffey Jr. is sixth all-time in home runs, with 630.

2. Griffey doubled off Dave Stewart of Oakland in his first major league plate appearance. The Mariners lost, 3-2, despite a complete game by Mark Langston.

3. Griffey hit five home runs in five Division Series games in 1995 as the Mariners eliminated the Yankees.